Lone Star (141 page)

All of this opposition was not pure reaction or stupid stubbornness. Texans were far closer to the heart and mind of 19th-century Anglo-America than others. Frequently, the greater nation telegraphed orders to Texas to change, when local conditions had not been taken into account. This was on occasion like trying to fight Indians, or defend the border, from preconceived notions in Washington. Laws that made sense for the industrial society did not always make sense in a preindustrial ethos. There was a parochialism in Washington thinking, which held that all parts of the United States were, or ought to be, the same. A certain colonialism continued. Texans could not resist a longing for the Yankees to let the natives in the hinterlands run things for themselves, whether the Great White Father liked the way they were run or not.

In some ways the Texan, out of his history, was far more tolerant than other Americans. Having no real ideology, he could not ride ideological horses or get worked up over things that did not personally affect him. No Texan really cared what kind of government Spain had; that was for Spaniards to decide. Nor did he care what kind of laws were passed in New York—so long as New Yorkers did not try to apply them to him. If the Texan had none of the New England libertarianism, he had little of the moralistic American penchant for meddling. He was far more tolerant of Germans or Russians, in the 20th century, than his apparent belligerency revealed. When Germans or Russians appeared to menace his interests, then he reacted with the frontier attitudes; otherwise, he could not care what they did. His ancestors had burned their bridges to any notion of a world society when they crossed the Atlantic; they deserted the British Isles because they found Europe, and all its works, intolerable.

It was impossible to imagine a protest emanating from Texas over some other nation's internal affairs—or even a protest march in atomistic Anglo-Texas. Mexicans did it, and Hungarians, but those were foreigners with a more organic view.

Such attitudes were natural; there would always be interest politics, because the United States was not, and probably never would be, an entirely unitary nation.

Yet the Texan was nothing if not an American.

All his traits of heart and mind and action were American traits in some degree. Nothing the Texan did, or believed, or thought, was foreign to
 

America, though some of it was foreign to some Americans. No American, from anywhere, felt he was crossing a border when he stepped across the Texas line. He was moving into different country, yes—foreign, no.

The American ethic was hardly dead in Chicago or New York, where men struggled to gain status, though not land, with the same intensity, though in different ways. The two most prominent Texans of the 1960s—Governor John Connally and Lyndon Baines Johnson, new-rich, capable, successful, boastful as only men with a sharecropper mentality who have made it big can be, buying ranches, and dressing like Chamber of Commerce presidents—had their counterparts from San Francisco to New York, where men made money from the garment industry or television, investing it in stocks or bonds. The oldest cities in America had plenty of men who wore diamond jewelry and boasted about their money, though admittedly few had Anglo-Saxon names. Between the farmer gone to town and the European newly across the Atlantic, there was an enormous bond, despite the occasional suspicion and hostility. America and its unspoken ethic made strong cement, for both Anglo-Celtics and Rumanians.

The bleak and unlettered view of God and God's earth, the stark and impoverished cultural tradition, the burning interest in what men do, or own, but not what they are, or might be—the motion, the pursuit, the ceaseless imperialism of the pragmatic mind—what American could deny these? All had a deep root in the English-speaking world, above all in America. Texas, from Stephen Austin to Sam Houston to L. H. McNelly to Lyndon Johnson, was only a boldly drawn example of Anglo-Saxon society, showing what any English-speaking community would do, under similar conditions. Between frontier Australia and frontier Texas there was an affinity that almost amounted to brotherhood: Down Under was one place Texans went to stay. A Texan became the most popular American ambassador to Australia that country has had. There was an essential vulgarity and violence in both souls.

If the Texan was little worried about what he was, and must obscure all thought in action, resting his case for greatness on great works, good or bad, most Americans were the same. If Lyndon Johnson chose to stand or fall on what he did in the vitally evil arena of public action, he would stand higher among Americans in many things than other men who chose to conceptualize and talk.

If Texans were man-centered, and to them the earth was nothing if not to be exploited; if God was not a God who died upon a cross but a smiling uncle who accepted a junior partnership while suffering little children to eat candy on his knee, what American would not destroy a river, or demolish a hundred forests, or create a dust bowl, if doing it provided a thousand jobs? What American was not a wholly economic man?

All Americans, in one way or another, had grasped their chosen land, out-Godded God, made a blaspheming, materialistic, burgeoning—and yet
decent
—society. They worked much kindness with their evils, much good with their gains. Texas was not a better place when the Comanches had it, killing Apaches with the torture and themselves barely living thirty violent, squalid, brutish years. Nor would the Spanish have erected a Garden of Eden, had their arms prevailed. The Spanish left enough evidence of that behind, in other places, other times.

The Texan despised the Mexican. But the Mexican problem, the race's real problem, was one Texas did not invent. Never exposed to the frontier ethic, he moved doggedly into a society saturated with the beliefs that life's a fight, that man must get ahead, bend nature to his will, even if he must destroy nature in the process. The
pelado
came from a culture where no man for four hundred years gained anything by slaving harder for his master; where his gentle hope that God might yet provide was still alive. He was unequipped to step into the whirlwind, against which other-driven men cannot stand. He thought "just like a Meskin—work eight hours, then payday, and hit the beer halls"; he was, but he could not march across that bleak puritan landscape and become an entrepreneur. Men who exist get overrun by men who act.

It was no different in San Antonio or New York.

What was the great drive toward new playgrounds, clean streets, better housing, better schools, and more bloodless bureaucracy that gripped 20th-century Texas metropoles but part of a last outburst of the American frontier heresy, the Pelagianism that had such deep roots in the Anglo-Saxon soul? The efforts to forge a single society out of many pillars, to improve the race of man by educating his mind: these heresies gripped the Texan as surely as the American mind.

He was an American, first and last.

Those who tried to reject the Jacksonian advance to the West, the policies of James Polk, and the Sheridan-Grant solution to the Indian problem as American aberrations themselves committed aberrations by not seeing things, and themselves, as they really were.

The history of Texas, and the people of Texas, were American history and American people, and in part, a part of the story of the world.

As the raw scar of the frontier fades and the frontier values evaporate, as they must; as Texan society grudgingly grows genuinely metropolitan, as it mixes and amalgamates with fresh waves of human stock, patterns change. The people change, as they must change. The first settlers called themselves Texians, and their descendants, and all those who took part in the great conquest, are properly called Texans. There are already several million non-Texan residents of Texas, and their numbers must increase. In another hundred years, perhaps, the reality of the frontier will be as remote to Texas residents as the American frontier is to residents of Massachusetts, where not one in seven people is descended from stock that killed an Indian. The Anglo conquest of the American West will become a distant thing, perhaps to be despised, certainly to be misunderstood, even if admired. Already certain Texas chauvinisms are dying; Texans are revising their own mythology.

That time is not quite yet. The office-working, car-driving Texan may soon be indistinguishable from his Northern counterpart, but something peculiarly Texan will still remain. The denizens of London, Paris, and Moscow do much the same kind of work, live much the same sort of lives in the modern age. However, no one would claim that they are the same. They have each been made different by the crucible of history, they think and act in different ways, according to the history that shaped their hearts and minds.

Texas of course will change greatly, perhaps become unrecognizable to the people of today. However, the history of Texas and the Texans will surely remain.

In the end, perhaps after all people, will be the land. It was stubborn soil, and it was difficult to destroy. Men tore it, gouged it, cut down its forest cover and plowed up its shielding grasses, yet most of it remained. The rivers were dammed, but they were still there. The seas of grass were cut by endless pasture fences, but the land itself, and the sweeping, rising, majestic plateaus were bedded in limestone too solid to remove. Nor would cities ever cover all of them, because when God made Texas, He made water scarce. Already, under the plateaus, the deep-driven wells were running dry. More plowed fields would shrink, more thick green-and-brown grass grow over the humus made by eons of bison bones. In many places, man had already begun a long retreat.

Most places had little changed. On Palmito O. G. Jones could still plant his guns where no one lived, and sweep the Yankees back to Boca Chica. The thicket where Rip Ford sat his horse and sounded the charge was still there. A few miles away, a rusting cannon marked the lonely prairie where Taylor crashed into the Mexicans. Taylor, and Arista, would have recognized the ground. Through much of Texas, only the ubiquitous paved roads, and fences, and telephone and powerline poles had changed the surface of the land.

The Coahuiltecs would have found their old hunting grounds as inhospitable as before. More cactus and mesquite grew on them, spread by the overgraze of cattle. But the
brasada
shimmered in the sun, much as it had for a thousand years.

The old Comanche trace to Mexico, near Fort Clark, lay still ephemerally green under the Comanche moon. Blue gentians grew in the headwaters of the Brazos, as they grew to the sound of Kiowa flutes. The bones of men and buffalo were gone; the land took them, and remained.

The vast stretches of the fraying limestone plateaus above the Balcones Scarp remained also; clear shallow streams playing over deep brown beds, the oaks standing ocher and solemn against the fading meadows after the first fall frost. Anywhere, across hundreds of leagues, the horizon rose clear against low hills for miles.

This land shaped those who lived upon it more than they changed it. Hostile, yet with a beauty the second generation came to love, with crashing meteorological changes that punished man and beast, with winds that made them uneasy, yet volatile and free, it somehow aroused a sense of music in the Spanish-Mexican soul. In Americans, it made feelings they could not articulate.

The land, the climate, the sense of endlessness yet constant change made all who came there hospitable, patriotic, violent, and brave. In the Indian it produced mysticism, as he wailed his death songs to the earth, the cold moon, and sun. In the Hispanic breast it made a communion with Nature, a poetry, a willingness to ride the broad vistas, pause under moss-hung oaks, and be.

The Anglo had no eye for beauty, less feel for rock-ribbed soil. Yet the land was too big even for big men to develop and destroy. He fenced it, dammed it, threw his cattle over it in prodigal hordes; he farmed it, and in drouth and shattering hail and cold, cursed Nature and Nature's God. Yet all these acts were in their own way acts of love. The Anglo-Saxon laced this soil with his own and other men's blood; it would take his bones, and monstrous artifacts, and still remain.

The sun would remain, while men must die. The moon would rise again, while civilizations fell. In the end would be the earth. Texas, under any name, would go on forever.

Bibliographical Notes and Suggestions for Further Reading

The most important sources of Texas history are found within the following broad categories, all of which I have drawn on heavily:

GENERAL HISTORIES

The best of the older books is Henderson K. Yoakum's
History of Texas 1685–1846
(New York, 1856). Another standard in every Texas library is Hubert Howe Bancroft,
History of the North Mexican States and Texas
(2 vols., San Francisco, 1884–89). These contain excellent coverage of the French-Spanish periods and reflect American moral certainties of the 19th century. Dudley G. Wooten,
A Comprehensive History of Texas
(2 vols., Dallas, 1897) reproduces Yoakum's text with additions. John Henry Brown,
A History of Texas
, 1685–1892 (2 vols., St. Louis, 1892–93) and Frank White Johnson,
History of Texas and Texans
(Chicago, 1914) are compilations of men and events with contemporary views. Johnson's work, largely written by editors E. C. Barker and E. W. Winkler, is a superior history, published a generation after his death. Interesting, but of lesser value, are William Kennedy,
Texas
(London, 1841; Fort Worth, 1925), and David B. Edward,
History of Texas
(Cincinnati, 1836).